The Condensed History of iaNett

Page 4: The times they are a'changing

By the end of August, we felt that we were at a point where we could begin our transition from development to marketing. After all, over the preceding months we had been infused with a steady stream of mixed messages from our parent company.

On one hand, the general feedback we received from them was for us to continue our development and investment money was there for us to proceed. But on the other, we were continually witnessing changes around the office, raising concerns about their long-term stability and financial position, reinforcing our desire to find customers and begin showing a profit as soon as possible.

So we moved our equipment into WSi's data centre in Harbour Centre and Alan went back to university. We relocated to new office space in another part of the building and continued our development and marketing efforts in relative solitude, away from the strained atmosphere in the main office.

Our objective now was to acquire the equipment needed to build up a full-scale version of our new search engine, and to show it off to the world. Surprisingly, we were met with a surprising unwillingness (or as we later discovered, inability) from our parent company to provide us with the equipment and resources we needed and as a result we were forced to turn our efforts towards sales and raising money ourselves.

We worked very hard for several months, but it was apparent that WSi was in serious trouble. By the end of 2000, they had laid off most of their staff and were desperately looking for new sources of income to survive.